I have three grown natural children and five young adopted children. Seven of the eight are boys. I have grown accustomed to knowing what to expect from them. We have five boys in the house who are very close together in age, two and a half to eight. There are some obnoxious behaviors that boys do and no matter how many times the behavior is corrected, they go back to doing it.
Boys love to pick up, carry, swing, sword fight and run with sticks. We live on a wooded lot and there are a lot of sticks to choose from. Being the son of an optometrist, I am very well versed on the dangers that sticks pose to eyes. A boy cannot walk by a stick and leave it alone.
Any home that has a lot of boys will have numerous flying objects being thrown around. Recently, I have seen toys, underwear, food, shoes, rocks, balls and dog poop fly by. We gave up on having a sandbox because of the sand flying through the air. I would be embarrassed if someone was counting all of the times that I have had to issue the “stop throwing” command.
Not all boys want to take zoology when they are in high school, but little boys love bugs, spiders, frogs, worms, turtles, and snakes. When I am landscaping and dig a hole, I draw quite a crowd. They want to see what gets dug up. One day last summer, we had two black widow sighting. Of course, they were under rocks, but no rock is left unturned in our yard. We finally had to get a non-domesticated cat to hopefully catch things before the boys find them.
The next topic does not need a lot of discussion. The subject is toilet seats. Sometimes, I think we spend more money on 409 than we do on milk.
Boys love to make impolite noises with their bodies. Yes, I am talking about burps, belches, and toots. That is the word we use for it at our house. If a group of boys is wildly laughing, they are probably taking turns making one or more of these sounds.
Last on my list is wrestling. I had always heard that you should never start a fight with a boy who has a lot of brothers. I now fully understand that saying. They wrestle from sunrise to sunset.
My wife does not understand. She thinks that she can train our boys to stop behaving this way. I go along with her, but I know better.
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